Public Narratives of Constituent Power in the European Union
This chapter provides a mapping of public narratives of constituent power in the EU. In this way, it seeks to identify adequate starting points for an endeavour of practice-oriented theory construction. Citizens have started to challenge the role of the states as the ‘masters of the treaties’. Drawing on a vocabulary of popular sovereignty and self-government, they demand that the EU should be shaped by ‘the people’. Focusing on the voices of actors such as protest movements and public intellectuals, the chapter traces four public narratives that articulate competing ideas as to who should be in control of European integration, how the respective subject came to find itself in that position, and how it should take action in the future. Based on these stories, the chapter turns to the emerging normative debate about the EU’s constituent subject in order to determine which proposals in political theory are worth pursuing and which are not—given their anchoring in public discourse or lack thereof. In this way, it sets the stage for the construction and evaluation of models of constituent power in the EU in subsequent chapters.